Here in Oregon, I work pretty closely with a company known as Eugene Design Pro. They help setup blogs for Realtors.  I help coach Realtors on how to use the blogs. So I created this short video to show how to get started with your new Eugene Design Pro Wordpress blog.  You will need to know the URL for your administrative site, your username and your password to get started.

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My desk (left to right): XP with Office 2003, Mac Mini with OSX & Vista Tablet with Office 2007

Here at Real Estate Technology coaching, we deal with a wide variety of software programs and an even wider variety of computer capabilities from users.  Two questions we here frequently are “Should I get a Mac for my next computer” and “Should I get an iPhone for my next phone.

Real Estate Technology Focus is born

We will focus on some of the more popular pieces of technology and how they relate to the real estate industry.  To begin, we will discuss Apple OSX. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m today’s Portland On Fire featured person!  Yesterday I won Posh’d, earlier today I received excellent revised news regarding my dad’s cancer treatment, and now I’m on fire!  This is turning out to be a great week, I hope it’s going great for you as well.

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I just wanted to give a quick thank you to my site visitors, Twitter followers, coworkers and everyone else who voted for me in the March Posh’d contest. 

For those who don’t know, here’s what Posh’d has to say about themselves:

“Ever visit other Real Estate websites for inspiration? Ever notice how many of them are VERY similar? We support those of you trying to break the mold and make the real estate sites on the web a better experience for everyone. We’re here to promote you and your fine work, but we also hope that up-and-coming site developers will be able to use Posh’d as a place for inspiration. We want to raise the bar for all Realtors and their sites.”

My old site (NickBostic.com - not currently maintained) won back in February.  A big thanks goes out to Eugene Design Pro for helping to get my concept for the look and feel working on the Wordpress platform.  That’s two wins!

Thanks everybody!

Check back tomorrow for Part 1 of “Apple: OSX and iPhone – Friend or Foe?”

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Sometimes, having grown up with technology, I overlook the obvious.  This time, it was a need for a basic image editing tool for all of those real estate photographs.

Not Photoshop

I grew up with Adobe products, so Photoshop comes pretty naturally to me.  Put someone who has never used it to work, and they will typically become rather frustrated.  Also, the nearly $700 suggested retail can be a bit much.  So Adobe Photoshop is out.

What does “basic” mean

My definition of basic is derived from the many real estate professionals I’ve worked with as well as the sales team I work with in my day job.  Basic is defined as:

• Free
• Easy to use
• Image resize capabilities
• Simple color/lighting touch up
• And Free

Although Adobe just released their Photoshop Express online tool today, after playing for about half an hour, I couldn’t find a resize function.  Crop yes, resize no.  If it’s there, it’s too difficult for most of the people I know to find it, so it’s out.

Online use

If you’re online, I thoroughly enjoy using Picnik.  It meets all of the qualifications and then some.  Play around with it, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.  I’ll be putting together a brief tutorial on how to use it soon.  They offer a paid version, which gives some enhanced photo editing capabilities, but the best feature for me of the paid version is a full screen view without the ads.  And it’s less than $25 a year.

The only real downside for basic real estate photo editing is that it is an online product, so if you aren’t online or have a really slow connection, this won’t be the best program for you.

Offline use

If you know me, you’ll know I’m a fan of Google.  They have an offline photo editing and cataloging program called Picasa.  Again, it meets all of the qualifications I set for a basic real estate picture editing program.  Editing is fast and easy, but knowing how to resize isn’t quite as intuitive as it should be. 

On the toolbar below your picture, you should see this:

If you click on the “Export” button on the far right, that’s where you can resize the image.

Even with Vista’s superb file search capabilities, I still recommend Picasa for cataloging and quickly viewing your photos.  I have several thousand photos on my home computer and Picasa makes it relatively easy and painless to find and preview my entire collection.

UPDATE: For those of us who like Picasa for viewing and sorting our images, but prefer Photoshop for editing, you can now add a button to Picasa to directly open your image in Photoshop.

If you’re using anything else, please mention it in the comments below so I can check it out.

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